Hustler and Fabulist

GEMINI

by NIKKI GIOVANNI 149 pages. Bobbs-Merrill. $5.95.

I really hope no white person

ever has cause to write about me because they never understand Black love is Black wealth

and they'll probably talk about my hard

childhood

and never understand that all the while I was quite happy.

These proud words come from Nikki Giovanni's best-known poem, Nikki-Rosa. At 28, she is one of the most talented and promising black poets. She is also one of the most visible, not only because she is beautiful but because she is a shrewd and energetic propagandist. In this interim autobiography, both poet and propagandist underscore that point about black love and happiness. Part memoir and part manifesto, it is a plainspoken, lively, provocative, confusing book.

The memoir part deals with growing up in a tightly knit, loyal family of social workers in Cincinnati and Knoxville. As a child she had two idols, her glamorous older sister Gary and her grandmother Louvenia. Nikki did all Gary's fighting for her for the excellent reason that Gary was a musician who argued that if her hands were "maimed," the families of her music teachers might starve. Protecting Louvenia was a harder assignment. Nikki's childhood ended the day she realized that her grandmother was dying.

Uprooted from her old house by a spurious urban-renewal scheme in Knoxville, Louvenia had lost the will to live. She was "gone, not even to a major highway but to a cutoff of a cutoff."

On the subject of her childhood, Miss Giovanni is magical. She meanders along with every appearance of artlessness, but one might as well say that Mark Twain wrote shaggy-dog stories. The little figure in the center--"big, brown eyes, three pigtails and high-top shoes"--is a classic American child, pelting rocks at her enemies from the roof, lining up for all-day movies, eating her liverwurst on raisin bread with mayonnaise.

The later chapters are less autobiography than polemic. The tone swings wildly from bitterness to defiance, from humor to cant, from wisdom to frenzy. The gentlest statement about whites is that "all white people need to be taken out of power, but they all clearly are not evil." The only white leaders to whom any quarter is offered are the dead Kennedy brothers and John Lindsay.

If Nikki Giovanni has ever suffered personally from the color of her skin, she does not admit it. An honor graduate of Fisk (in history) who nearly went into social work too, she has instead taught creative writing at Rutgers and become a major figure in the black oral poetry movement. Hers is a committed social rage. She is capable of scalding rhetoric, but the artist in her keeps interrupting. For one thing, she is a natural fabulist. A tirade on colonialism turns into a series of irresistible parables about the wise and natural black man faced with the petty, scheming honky. Also, she cares too much about language not to kid her own fire breathing, at least occasionally: "I'm essentially a hustler because I'm essentially Black American and that carries essentially a hustling mentality (if you can essentially follow that)."

One feels that Gemini will not be her last autobiography. For one thing, she is determined to keep publishing. One of her few deep criticisms of a black is directed at Novelist Ralph Ellison, because he has published no novel since The Invisible Man in 1952. "He can put us down and say we are not writers, who are persistently exposing our insides and trying to create a reality."

That is Nikki Giovanni's approach.

She keeps sending out bulletins--in poetry, prose, children's books --whether they are neat or messy, rash or reasoned. But one senses a dynamic intelligence behind the shrillest page of Gemini. It is a report about a life in progress that demands to be seen.

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